Hi, I'm Matt!

Senior Engineer & Engineering Manager

I help companies ship faster, scale smarter, and make better technical decisions - from backend systems in Go and GCP to embedded hardware, ML infrastructure, and engineering leadership. Whether you need a hands-on contractor, a fractional EM, or a technical advisor, I bring 20+ years of experience across startups and enterprise.

Personal Projects

Purple

Purple connects to your local Ollama instance and gives the model real tools to act on your Linux or MacOS system. Unlike cloud assistants, it has no API key to manage, no usage caps, and no privacy trade-offs.

Trained own 1.3B LLM model from scratch

A while back I decided to train a language model from scratch. Not fine-tune one. Not LoRA-adapt one. Train one - weights initialized to noise, tokenizer built from my own corpus, the whole thing.

AIP - Tool to visualize and manage AI training

AIP is a terminal-based training monitor I built while training my own 1.3B-parameter Polish language model from scratch on an RTX 4080.

Expertise

Project Management

I have been managing projects for high-profile companies including EPAM, StubHub, Pearson Education, MeteoGroup (now DTN), BBC Weather, and Magic Leap. Throughout my career I have built deep skills in working with Agile teams, implementing Scrum at org scale, delivery processes, milestone planning, product timelines, and risk management. 20 years of experience shows up on a daily basis - supporting great people in delivering innovative products within budget and on time.

Solution Architecture

My customers value my design and deployment of systems at scale — from distributed backend platforms handling millions of transactions to lightweight embedded solutions running on microcontrollers. My architecture work spans payment infrastructure at StubHub and Uber, weather data pipelines at MeteoGroup and BBC Weather, educational platforms at Pearson, backend infrastructure at Epic Games, and most recently XR infrastructure at Magic Leap. So far I have delivered more than 20 projects that helped my customers meet the expectations of their users.

Technology and hands on experience

I believe great engineering leadership starts with staying close to the code. Throughout my career I have remained a hands-on practitioner building production systems in Go, C, C++ and Java, designing embedded firmware on ESP32 and RISC-V microcontrollers, training large language models from scratch, and architecting cloud infrastructure on GCP. I led teams at many high-profile companies in Silicon Valley, and I built my own local-first AI platform, IoT sensor network, and blog engine outside of work hours. In my experience, a manager who cannot read a pull request, challenge a technical decision, or unblock an engineer at the code level is a cost centre — not a force multiplier. My teams have always known that I can sit down next to them and help ship.

People Manager supporting growth

Over my career I have built and led engineering organisations of up to 40 people, growing talent from junior engineers all the way through to senior and lead roles, many of whom went on to drive entire delivery streams independently. Working across diverse tech stacks and domains has sharpened my ability to quickly understand individual strengths and align them to the right challenges. I believe a manager's primary job is to make their team not need them. That means investing in people's growth, creating clear career progression, removing impediments before they become blockers, and building an environment where engineers have the tools, context, and confidence to make good decisions on their own. My proudest professional moments are not shipped products - they are the engineers I watched become leaders.

Testimonials

Every time I find myself in a difficult spot or facing a complex architectural roadblock, I ask myself one question: "What would Matt do?" More often than not, keeping that perspective guides me to the right solution. Matt possesses a rare and powerful combination of deep technical brilliance and exceptional pragmatism. He doesn't just build great systems; he knows how to deliver them efficiently. As a leader, he is a masterclass in effective delegation—he trusts his team, empowers them, and consistently sets everyone around him up for success. I’ve watched him lead numerous high-stakes migrations, orchestrating large teams and moving parts under immense pressure without ever flinching. It has been an absolute pleasure to work alongside Matt and learn from him, and he would be a massive asset to any engineering organization lucky enough to have him.

Barney Hsiao · Senior Software Engineer @ MagicLeap & Netflix · MagicLeap (currently), Netflix

Mateusz was Manager in my team for almost 3 years. All this time he always was dedicated to work, supportive in case of problems/challenges. Never hesitated to even step in when there was such a need and develop source code. He showed himself also as a extremly strong mentor, learning younger collegues, supporting them in their process of development what oftenly caused that they exceed their expectations. Even if last time when we have occasion to cooperate was 4 years ago, I still found him as one of the best Lead I have ever worked with and frankly speaking I am looking forward for further cooperation.

Piotr Mazur · Senior Java Developer @ EPAM Systems · BVNK (currently)

During our time working together, they consistently demonstrated strong technical skills and a very collaborative approach. We had rich conversations and he consistently contributed valuable ideas and insights. His positive attitude and dedication to achieving results makes him a valuable asset to any team. I highly recommend Mateusz for any position that requires technical competence and collaboration skills.

Jerome Thaibaud · Chief Architect @ StubHub · Opus1.io (currently)

As product manager I have learned Mateusz as an excellent IT specialist with lots of know how. During the years we worked together from different countries Mateusz was always very supportive and he learned, trained and advised me in an excellent way to make good decisions as product manager. I see him as a perfect Agile team player

Phil Van Haren · Agile Product Manager Transport @ MeteoGroup · Weathernews Inc. (currently)

Check more at LinkedIn

EPAM CEO AWARD

2019

Received the EPAM CEO Award for Business Growth in recognition of significant customer account expansion driven by me team's technical excellence — consistently stepping up to solve complex customer problems and delivering high-quality solutions that exceeded expectations.

Let's work together

Have a project in mind, a team that needs leadership, or a technical problem that keeps getting pushed down the backlog? I am available for contract engagements, fractional engineering management, and consulting. Let's figure out if I'm the right fit.

Latest posts

Ollama-powered purple backend

The era of local LLMs promised tremendous power but often came with crippling limitations: your development environment became tethered to high-end GPU hardware. But what if you didn't have to choose?In this deep dive, we explore how Ollama is revolutionizing model deployment by acting as a standardized, portable runtime layer—think of it as the universal operating system for open-source AI models. We examine the architecture powering Purple: a robust hybrid backend that ensures absolute continuity. Whether you are running demanding, private workloads on your powerful home workstation or working remotely on limited hardware, Ollama allows developers to maintain a single, flawless workflow.Discover how achieving model portability means escaping vendor lock-in and physical constraints simultaneously. We break down the technical advantages of blending local private deployment with seamless cloud access, giving you the operational freedom necessary to build truly universal AI applications.

Why I Built Purple — And Why It Took 20 Years to Get Here

I've been thinking about AI since before it was cool to think about AI—studying neural networks, formal logic, and operating system internals at my university in Katowice. At the time, it seemed almost impossible that these fields would ever converge, but they did. The wait, however, felt incredibly long.My early professional experience taught me relentless discipline: building commercial software (around 2001), generating revenue with mobile apps in foreign markets (China, 2007), and iterating through diverse tech stacks at companies like EPAM, Uber, and Pearson.

Building my own LLM, because why not?

A while back, I decided to train a language model from scratch—not fine-tuning, not LoRA-adapting—but building it all out: initializing weights to noise and building a custom tokenizer from my own corpus. The goal was deeply technical and slightly irrational: I wanted to understand what happens *inside* these models. Not just at the API level, but during those 2 AM moments when the loss curve starts behaving weirdly.